Deutschland, Ho!
Well, the day we were all waiting for has finally arrived. I’m sure that my parents are throwing a party in the wake of my departure… That’s right, I’m in Kassel, Germany right now. It has been an incredibly long trip, too, so I will probably collapse into a heap soon. So, I started out (Friday) taking a plane from Portland to Denver, Colorado. Pretty typical for that kind of flight. Window seat, nobody next to me. It was good. Unfortunately, I only had enough time to call my brother and use the restroom before they started boarding my flight. I didn’t have to go through customs here though, which was nice. That flight took me all the way from Denver to Heathrow Airport in London. The flight was Ok, I suppose. Really big plane, but the coach section wasn’t too crowded, so I had an aisle seat with nobody on my side, once again. It was nice to stretch my legs. Talked to a lady who was going with her son to Geneva for a conference on Cancer treatments. Pretty interesting bunch. Turns out that her son wanted to do engineering of some sort originally, but his college only offered physics. Heathrow makes all of the other airports that I’ve been to look amazing. This was probably the worst organized airport I have ever been to. I didn’t even know which gate my connecting flight was at until about 15 minutes before boarding. Talk about disorganized. Not to mention they accidentally turned a plane full of people loose into the departure area, so a bunch of security guards were freaking out and interrogating people, trying to figure out who actually belonged in the departure area. Good job guys. Anywho, my last flight was pretty good, window seat again, and I sat next to a relatively attractive woman who was probably a teacher or something, because there was about 20 kids on the plane and she kept on checking a list of them. This flight was actually my first use of German language, because it was with Lufthansa and we were flying into Frankfurt. I actually asked for “Wasser mit Gas” or basically mineral water (also called “mineralwasser”). I can’t remember who told me this, but someone did tell me to only drink the water with gas/carbonation.
“Schwimmweste unter Ihrem Sitz” – “Swimming vest under your seat”
So, on arrival to Frankfurt, things started to get interesting. I picked up my luggage (1 big bag = 50lbs, 1 small bag = 38lbs, 1 backpack = 37lbs, 1 laptop carrying tote = 28lbs) Needless to say, I probably looked pretty silly carting around a hundred pounds of luggage. Customs was kinda a joke, if you ask me. I had my Passport stamped by an officer who was probably younger than me, and then since I’m not selling any goods, I don’t have anything to declare. W00t. 5 minutes, and I’m walking on foreign soil. Not for long, because I had a train to catch. Fortunately, all of the people working in the airport spoke excellent english, because otherwise I would have been hosed. I bought a ticket for a high speed train directly to my final destination, Kassel-Wilhelmsöhe… but that train was cancelled. . . Or so I thought. A train came at the designated time, but it was a different number, and I asked one of the train officials if the train went to Kassel, and he said no. So, I sat down and waited. Then the train left. And I waited some more. And waited. And waited. Until the next train came… and this one was bound for Munich. Wrong direction. Hmm… A half an hour had passed already, so I decided to go back to the ticket booth and ask about the train that was supposedly not headed to Kassel. As it turns out, that was the train that I wanted, because it connected at the Frankfurt main terminal with another high speed train into Kassel. So that sucked. But the guy was cool, he hooked me up with a roundabout ticket on another train that did just about the same thing.
So I boarded the train that he pointed out, and there were so many people on board that I practically had to sit on my luggage in front of the lavatory, with about six other people. One of the women had a small child with her, who fell over twice when we were decellerating rapidly. Poor kid. At least the children still cry for their mothers though. That was about all that I could understand from the six of them. So, after bouncing off of the Frankfurt main station, I hopped onto another train bound for Kassel. This train, fortunately, had plenty of seating. I actually ended up sitting next to another college student who studied international affairs in Switzerland. A german native, he had just finished a similar two week language immersion course in France. He spoke english very well (with an english accent too), so we bs’ed about college and studying abroad until I had to get off at Kassel. This was probably the most strenuous part of my journey, because I had already been lugging around over a hundred pounds of luggage, and now I had to drag it up a ramp that was a quarter mile long to reach the exit. Argh. My back still hurts just thinking about that.
Then I used some spare change to call my Host Family, and Carsten (the father) picked me up. I still haven’t picked up the mother’s name, but I believe that they also have a child. There is one other student staying here at their house, and his name is also Will. He is from Hungary. I haven’t met him yet, because it was roughly 11pm local time when I rolled into Kassel.
My room is very, very nice. Much better than my old apartment, that’s for certain. However, I haven’t yet purchased any electrical adapters. Everyone here seems relatively nice, once you get past the language thing. The mother made me some sandwiches and sliced tomatoes from the garden when I told her that I hadn’t eaten yet. We watched some television too, a crime show/comedy/drama (I was lost, only catching little bits of it), then a show about some Norwegian train tour that looked really cool. It reminded me a lot of the historic Ghost Train in Ely, Nevada… Just cooler, because it went over 800m waterfalls and over crazy hundred year old stone bridges. At this point I was catching a little more of the descriptions , since I’m more familiar with train related vocabulary than crimes. The final program was really cool, because I had seen the equivalent program in English before on the National Geographic channel or Discovery Channel back home. It was about the scientists that study this glacier on some big ass mountain in the Swiss Alps, and they use time-lapse photography to record the motion of it both above and below ground with a pretty kick ass tunnel dug underneath the ice.
Well, there you have it. A compressed version of the last 25 hours of my journey. Now, I think I will get some sleep, so I can adjust to this whole 9-hours ahead thing. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’m insanely tired. Gute Nacht!
So, I had some strangely prophetic dreams last night, and I figured that I would relate them to you to set the stage for my descriptions of my first full day in Germany (it’s a busy ass day, too). I dreamt that I met a bunch of the other students from the Kassel Language Immersion program, and we went around town and ended up in a really strange church like place that turned out to be a cannibalism center. Anyways, that last part is way off, but the other two are actually pretty accurate. The people in my dream were far less interesting than the people that I met, however.
So, to connect this together, I woke up relatively early. I could have slept in, but I heard some shuffling around downstairs, and the sunlight was already shining through the windows. I rolled out of bed at 8am and went downstairs to help the Mother prepare breakfast. Her name is Katarina (I think). I set the table, and she set out breads and cheeses and some various meat products. Some looked scarier than others, but I tried one that was ok. I wasn’t that hungry though, so I only made myself a little sandwich and drank some Darjeeling tea. The other Will came downstairs too, so I met him. He is 20 years old and has been with the Kassel program for three weeks already. He speaks much better German than I can, but I was somewhat relieved to find out that he speaks English as well. Interestingly enough, he is also studying Chinese, and wants to get into Chinese Business studies. His first name is not William, but Willmar (spelling?), but we use the same shortened version, so there were some amusing moments when someone was talking to one of us and we said “Welcher Will” (which Will?). Kinda funny. I will only probably refer to him as Will, because it would be a pain to go back to this and convert all of the Willmars into the correct version if I screwed up the spelling. Anyways, I digress.
So after breakfast, Will wanted to go to meet some of his friends and go to a thermabath (hot springs bath-house), and asked if I wanted to tag along and meet the other Kassel people who are part of the other specialized international program (not just the language course like I am taking). I said yes, of course, because otherwise I would have been left at home with nothing to do, since everyone else was going to church. However, instead of taking the bus, we were going to get a ride from the host family after church, so we just went with them to their little church service. It was very pretty, but in a new building (not in an old cathedral or something). I barely understood any of the service, but the music was very beautiful. The host family mother Katarina played the violin in the little group, and Carsten gave a short announcement (I think he was talking about some current events in the community, but I’m not sure). After this, they drove us to the Capital Building of Kassel, which has a name that sounds like “Rat-House”, so I was very confused at first.
So we waited there for about ten minutes for his friends, and only one showed up, an 18 year old Bulgarian guy named Christian. He is pretty damn hilarious, and likes to goof around a bit. In fact, both him and Will are extremely funny, and were fun to hang out with. At first, I wasn’t able to talk much in the group because we were using mostly German, but once we switched to English (because of laziness), it was much better (I know that’s terrible, since I’m supposed to learn German, but this offered me a lot of relief to meet some people here roughly my age). So, we hung around the Capital Building for a half an hour, and then we decided to just leave for the hot springs since nobody else had showed up yet. We took the StrassenBahn (street train) to Wilhelmschöhe, which was were the hot springs were at.
Now, this was a fuggin strange experience, because at the top of this hill in the middle of the forest is an Oriental Bathhouse. IN GERMANY! How strange is that? Apparently they were mining for something and struck and underground hotspring, so now it bubbles up freely. For 18 euros, we were allowed to stay in there for 4 hours, with a one hour grace period before they fine you. Which was good, because we were running pretty late by the end.
Anyways, so this place was absolutely incredible. I’ve never been to someplace quite like this. They had three main shallow swimming pool type things on the main floor than wrapped all through the building and outside as well. You could pass through the wall under a little bridge in one of the swimming pools, so if it was too cool outside you could warm up inside without having to leave the water. Also, the bar wrapped around the one main pool, and there was a small beer garden and sun tanning lawn with fancy oriental nouveau lawn chairs. There were also three big hot tubs inside of the building build in this cascading rock garden column, which helped to support the second floor (yes, crazy fucking Germans, they build two storied spas). Outside, there was also two waterfalls that you could stand under (although these had cold water, so they were kinda painful), and a pretty cool waterslide that deposits you underneath the bigger of the two waterfalls. Now upstairs is where the true crazy German culture shock begins, because it became clothing optional at this point (actually, in the saunas, no clothing allowed). So, you basically had forty or so old, wrinkly, fat guys and women walking around in their birthdaysuits, and occasionally a beautiful Fraulien (who was almost always accompanied by a protective boyfriend). These girls tended to be more modest, and would wrap towels around themselves for the most part. Granted, there were a few that I had to pick my jaw up off of the floor when they walked by. So, we tried out the sauna, which was kinda comical, because about five minutes in, some lanky guy with a bucket of water carrying a towel (and fully clothed) walks in and asks how the temperature is, and everyone (well, except me and my companions) answers in unison “garaeoiaoahgglblagghenblaghblagh” I didn’t understand a goddamn word of it, but they said it like it was planned or something, and it was hard to keep from laughing. The guy then put water on the coals and whipped the towel around to blow the hot steam into our faces. Then he asked once again how the temperature was, and the same thing. “bolaowjghjglgeblagghen”. More of the same. It was pretty cheesy, but amusing.
Then we got out after almost dying from the heat, and jumped into an absolutely frigid pool outside on the second floor. This was most painful. So after all of this, we were feeling pretty sapped of energy, so for lunch we had beer and candybars (yum). Do we still sell Mars Bars in the USA? I hadn’t seen them in a while. Anyways, so we then finally met up with the rest of the group that came late, and it was once again, a good introduction to European life. There were a bunch of girls and one guy. So we went from a group of three guys scoping out hot chicks to four guys in the middle of seven or eight cute girls. I’m terrible with names, but I remembered their nationalities fairly well. The other guy is from Slovakia (I think), and primarily spoke German to everyone (which everyone but me could follow well). Then there was a girl from Italy, a girl from the Czech Republic, a Norwegian girl, two Spanish girls, and a girl from Portland, Oregon (yeah, Portland of all places). There are two more girls I think, and I cannot recall their nationalities at the moment.
We hung around the bathhouse for a little bit longer, but had to leave at five since our time limit was up. After getting a quick cup of Cappucino, we headed out for a castle on the top of the mountain nearby. Apparently, this was the castle that Napoleon’s brother stayed for a while, and it houses the second largest collection of Rembrandt paintings in the world. However, it was closed, so we just met another person there, also from the Kassel program. We hung out on the lawn for a while, but some people had to leave. However, the remaining people (me, Will, Christian, Christina (the Norwegian), and Andrea (the girl from the Czech republic) walked to the top of the mountain (even higher) to another castle, which was built two hundred years ago. It was much smaller than the other one and looked as though it was being repaired. Finally, we walked back down the hill to the StrassenBahn and took it to a park where we met with three guys from the program (one is the Slovakian guy from before), and I didn’t catch the nationalities of the other two, and I’m still terrible with names.
So, we sat in the park till it got dark and cold, and went back home. We arrived at about ten thirty or so, and at some tasty Kartoffel Salad (potato Salad) and basically a big fish stick. Yum. All things considered, I’m not very hungry after all of the swimming and walking today. I’m sunburned and have blisters on my feet, but other than that, all is good. I think I am very fortunate to have already met so many wonderful people. Everyone in the group was interesting and funny, and even though I started out as the “outsider”, I’ve now been invited along to go with them to an Irish Pub this week for a celebration, since this is their last week here (kinda sad, really). Oh well.
Anyways, so isn’t it strange how my dream paralleled my day? I mean, strange churchlike place in the dream turned into an actual church in reality (it even had three crosses, but not quite the same), and then meeting people from the Kassel program. Strange. Ah well. If this mechanical engineering gig falls through, I’ll become a fortune teller.
Anyways, time to sleep. Gotta get up early tomorrow for class. Ciao!(apparently everyone in Europe uses this, so it’s not just a Californian thing… Or a French thing.)
Well, so much for that sleep thing last night. Somehow I think I got kicked back to Oregon time, I think. Then again, I’ve been caught in some sort of cruel catch 22, where I get extremely thirsty, drink a bunch of Mineral Water, and then I have to pee immediately. The mineralwasser does almost nothing to quench my thirst, either. Frustrating. So that’s basically what I did last night while tossing and turning, worrying about shit. I think part of that was because I wasn’t feeling very well, because of the sunburns I had. They are surprisingly not bad, and they don’t even hurt today. Maybe I can actually get a tan here.
Crap, still no internet. Maybe there is some upstairs.
Whew, day three (well, two and a half). Well, this immersion thing does some interesting things to your mind. Like a tour-de-force on your gray matter, you find yourself starting to catch bits of conversations and stuff. Tomorrow, I must bring my camera to Königsplatz, which is the center of the city of Kassel. I was pretty confused about the layout of this place at first, but the buses and trains make it pretty simple to get around. Heck, I found my way back home with only a street name. So today, I finally started classes. We met a group of the other students at the StraßenBahn station in Königsplatz. Then, we took a short ride up the hill towards the college. It is spread out along the main street there (can’t remember the name… Something + Straße, and the ß = ss). After getting a cup of coffee, we all went to the building. It’s not much to look at, but the Kassel Language program runs out of a single building. Most of the people I was hanging out with were from the advanced program (well, I say advanced, but they are kind of pursuing a different goal from the program, an international degree in German). But eventually, they all had to go to class, and I sat with the other two new students. One is Yoki (sp?), and she is from Japan, and speaks very little English and about the same amount of German as me. The other is Victoria (I think), she is Ukranian, and has been studying German for 3 years, so needless to say she can speak it much easier. She also speaks no English, so we made an amusing group, probably. The only language we could communicate in is the one we are all trying to learn. Really, this was good, because it gave us some good practice.
Then, they called us into one of the classrooms, one with a bunch of computers in the desks in a small halfcircle around a central table. All of the classrooms are very small, and can probably hold a maximum of 10-12 students at once. Here, we were given our placement tests and one hour to complete it. It had 120 questions, and it began with the simplest and ended with the most difficult. I actually did pretty well, because I placed into the same class as the Ukranian girl, which consists of three other advanced students. There is Mitch, who is from Michigan (finally, someone I could speak English to!), Mary (I couldn’t pronounce her real name, because it is kinda complicated), and she is from France, and Allen, whom I cannot recall his nationality, but his native language is Arabic. Thus, we had quite a mixed group.
The class was pretty damn tough, too. I could understand some of it, but had issues with vocabulary (which I expected). However, so did some of the other students, and I knew some things the others didn’t too. But the instructor wasted no time in dishing out the pain, with nonstop drills on sentence matching and picture descriptions. We ended that class with a pair of rhymes, which were meant to improve our pronunciation of certain consonants that are widely misspoken. These were pretty damn funny, especially the one with “Pf” versus “f” versus “p”, which was about something involving a horse eating a priest’s food off of a table.
Then we had a lunch break from 12:30 to 2:00, which I thought was pretty generous. Once we were out of the classroom, most of the people switched back to English, for the sake of socializing more efficiently. I joined my group of friends from the previous days, and we made our way to the cafeteria. It was actually very inexpensive for relatively decent portions of food. I had a curry dish that was pretty good, even if it wasn’t very spicy.
When we finished up, we went back to the lawn on the front of the building of our classes and waited, talking about some amusing things. There is a fellow from Scotland named Ronan (sp?) who was doing a lot of impressions of actors like Tom Hanks. He is part of the advanced class too, and speaks German, French, and several other languages I think.
Holy crap, talk about being bombarded with various languages. In our little group, we have only three repeat nationalities, myself and Mitch from the USA (Felicia from Portland only went to school there, she is really from Moldavia originally), and two girls from Italy, and a girl and a guy from France.
Anyways, at 2:00 we went back to the multimedia lab, where the second half of classes were taught. This consisted of very simple grammar drills for my group, and some audio drills for others. I think this must be how I placed into the advanced class, because my written grammar is actually fairly decent. While I didn’t finish the lessons, it didn’t matter, because it was self moderated. There are no grades that I am aware of at the moment. The teacher for the multimedia lab is very kind and helpful (and she is kinda cute, so that helps too). All of the teachers mostly only speak German to us, which makes it very interesting sometimes. I think that is one of my weaknesses, is hearing and understanding simultaneously. My brain just doesn’t work that fast, to listen to what someone says, and to process a response for it.
Wow, rambling. Anyways, so after class, things got a little more exciting. So I had fortunately jotted down the street name for the bus stop near my host family, because I lost track of everyone else. I had to get a book from the office, so when I got outside, everyone had left. I was determined not to fret, however. So, instead of taking the StraßenBahn, I set out on foot to explore the region. This turned out to be an excellent choice, because I accomplished some goals, and saw some cool things.
First I walked to the Königstraße trainstop, hoping to see some familiar faces. Seeing none, I went to the Bus Information Center, and purchased a month long pass on the local buses for 41 euros. This is a better deal than paying for each bus ride, and better than getting two passes that are only good for one week. I made this transaction in halting, broken up German, but the guy was understanding of my situation (plus it wasn’t actually a difficult question, I just stumbled over the word for Bus-ticket, so it probably sounded like a bizarre automobile thing). He spoke some English, but I refused to give into the urge to switch, and managed to finish the transaction pretty smoothly (much to his and my own surprise).
From there, I walked to around the Königstraße some more (it’s a big round city center, with little cafés and shops lining it. There are these cool fountains that ring the entire place. It is very busy, because the trains have a main stop right in the center of the circle. I decided to check out the Mall (named “City Point”… Yes, in English. I had to laugh at a few businesses that use disjointed English words or sentences for their names or advertisements). I walked downstairs to use the restroom, and bumped into one of the other students from the college. She told me that most of the other people who we hung out with yesterday didn’t get out of class until 4:30, and she wasn’t sure what their plans were. This was fine, but I really should have remembered to ask if she had anyone’s cell phone numbers. Even though I don’t have one that works here, I could easily call from one of the ten bazillion payphones. Ah well. I was in a rush to get to the restroom, methinks.
I also briefly saw Mitch, but he was a few levels above me in the mall. I suppose I should describe the building… It is very interesting. It is almost football shaped on the inside, and it had five levels. There are a lot of curved glass panels and polished metal bits everywhere. It was pretty funny though, because I could have easily wanted to shop there just by looking in the stores. There were many stores just like ones in the USA, and actually there were two grocery stores as well. Well, German grocery stores. Hard to explain. I went to the top, where I found an electronics store. I walked around until I found some US-European electrical adapters, and then left to check out Königstraße again. (by the way, for a quick German lesson, König is “King”, and Straße is “Street”. Fun, isn’t it?) Seeing nobody, I got a drink from a little shop, and checked out the bus maps until I found my one street name. This took an amazingly long time, because I had written it down sloppily and with a “-“ between what I thought were two words, but really it was all one word. However, once I did figure it out, the correct bus wasn’t gonna come for another fifteen minutes or so. I walked around some more, checking out shops and side-streets until I saw my bus.
This was kind of exciting, because I wasn’t 100% certain that it was really my bus. I just hopped on one with a familiar number and familiar street name. Granted, it took a while to get there, but I finally arrived at my stop. Of course, as soon as I got to my host-family’s house, I remembered a bunch of stuff that I should have bought. Paper, notebooks, an alarm clock, and probably a surge protector thing. Then I should be set. Since I have arrived here, money has flown out of me faster than shit from a Christmas goose, not to mention anything I spend is really 1.5 times more expensive in US$. Argh.
Wow, German rap from the early 90’s is funny as hell. They mix English and German freely, which makes it confusing as hell. The song I’m hearing on the radio sounds just like that song from Price of Bell air or whatever the hell it is. Whoo… Now I have to do some homework. Hopefully I can get the internet password tonight. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.
Whoo! Internets. Post. Now.
I will upload some pics later. Must email people now.
Rock on, Willmar.
Comment by Mik — September 16, 2008 @ 12:46 pm